Startup advisors often talk to young companies about product market fit. Product market fit is when your product solves a real world problem, and people are buying your solution. The goal of customer interviewing, minimum viable products, user testing and entrepreneurship in general is to achieve product market fit. Without it, a company cannot sustain itself.
Product market fit is an important concept, but I am interested in business model life fit. Business model life fit is how well your business model fits in with your livelihood.
For example, opening a restaurant and working as the head chef may not be compatible with a life of going out with your friends on the weekends. If you value spending Saturday nights watching movies with your family, opening a traditional restaurant might not be the business model for you.
But this doesn’t mean you can’t be a chef. This just means you have to get creative about how you’re going to run your operation. You need a more clever business model that doesn’t require your restaurant to be open on Saturday nights. (Or you need to hire good enough people so you don’t have to be present at that time.)
Instead of opening a dinner restaurant, you could open a breakfast place that closes at 2:00pm. Maybe you’re an early riser with an affinity for exotic coffees. A brunch restaurant sounds like a better business model life fit. If you’re not an early riser, then maybe you want to be a caterer and do corporate lunches. You can wake up at a reasonable hour, prepare food in the late morning, and drop it off at office parks around your town for lunch time. If someone wants to hire you to cater an event, you have the power to say no, rather than a traditional restaurant where the show always goes on.
This doesn’t only apply to restaurant entrepreneurship. Business model life fit can be applied to a job as well. If you want to leave all your work at the office and not worry about it at home, find a job where that is the case. If you don’t mind responding to email after dinner and finishing a report before bed, find a job that rewards you for that work. As an individual, your business model is about how you get paid for your work. Find the ways to get paid that fit with the life you want to live.
These are decisions that we can influence if we make them a priority. Think about your life and get creative in finding a business model that fits just right.